Google Just Gave Photographers A Big Reason To Choose Android Over The iPhone

Google's new Android software comes with an important feature for
photography enthusiasts: the ability to shoot raw images.

This means users will be able to see what photos look like before
the phone's camera processes it and translates it to a JPEG file.

The ability to shoot in raw is common on high-end DSLR cameras,
but it hasn't really been available for mobile phones until
recently.

Nokia's Lumia 1520 and 1020, which are known their high-end
cameras, both offer this capability. But now it looks like this
feature will be rolling out to most newer Android phones,
too.

So why does this matter? The average person probably doesn't care
much about shooting photos in raw.

In fact, it would probably be more of an inconvenience than an
improvement. The camera software in phones are built to compress
and translate images into a JPEG or similar file format since
it's easy to share and edit,
as CNET's Stephen Shankland notes in his feature about raw
coming to the Android platform.

But those who do know a thing or two about photography could
benefit greatly from the new feature. Unlike JPEG or PNG, raw
gives you the freedom and flexibility to edit and manipulate
particular parts of an image.

Raw photos are essentially pure image data captured through a
camera without any compression or modifications — meaning
photographers can fiddle with it any way they want using software
like Photoshop, as Shankland explains. In other words, when
you're shooting in raw the camera's software doesn't make any
assumptions about how colors and other elements of an image
should look.

It might not be the most noticeable addition to Android, but it
opens up the door for mobile phones to replace professional
cameras in certain circumstances. And, it certainly gives Android
a leg up over the iPhone in that particular regard. Although the
iPhone takes fantastic images, it doesn't allow you to shoot in
raw like you can with phones running Android 5.0.